As a licensed officiant at Las Vegas Immersive Weddings, a chapel that gives novelty-themed marriage packages, Kevin Breen has officiated nearly each sort of service conceivable: {couples} dressed as their favourite Game of Thrones characters, companions actually into the extraterrestrial lore of Area 51. However when he acquired a name final 12 months from a girl in California expressing a need to marry her chatbot, it was a primary for him.
“I had by no means heard of such a factor, however I talked to her on the cellphone and she or he appeared completely regular and enjoyable,” Breen says, including that the wedding ceremony nonetheless hasn’t taken place. “She sort of bought that it was an uncommon factor, however it was one thing that she needed to do.”
Although they continue to be area of interest, human-AI marriages are slowly rising as a pure endpoint to the widespread adoption of AI companion apps. However not everybody is as open as Breen is about the thought of tying the knot with a bot. A number of lawmakers, primarily from Republican states, are making an attempt to cease it from occurring, in some circumstances mirroring the arguments used in opposition to homosexual marriage.
“If we’re going to enable males or ladies to marry a machine, then what retains them from marrying their animal or a tree or no matter else they need? What’s the normal?” says Missouri state senator Joe Nicola, a Republican who has been making an attempt to go state laws prohibiting AI from gaining authorized personhood.
In a Harvard Business Review study, which analyzed greater than 12,600 AI use circumstances between March 2025 and February 2026, companionship and remedy have been the prime use circumstances for chatbots, with the Institute for Household Research reporting that a quarter of young adults imagine that AI might substitute human romance altogether.
The AI romance business has gone increase in consequence. On companion apps like Character.AI, Kindroid, and Replika, customers can symbolically swap vows with their chatbot. Not way back, in r/KindroidAI, a redditor shared a photograph of their tattooed (and really human) hand sporting a silver wedding ceremony band. “Fortunately unconventionally married lol,” they wrote. For $15, the platform OpenVows offers a “certificates of dedication” that “transforms a personal relationship into one thing significant and formally acknowledged,” in accordance to its web site.
There is additionally a small quantity of people that are transferring beyond the virtual ceremony and solidifying their bond with IRL vow exchanges. In November 2024, after Andrea Hopf mentioned her AI companion proposed to her with an “AI-generated five-carat vintage-inspired solitaire ring,” she created wedding ceremony planning service 3M Events to cater to the increasing market of chatbot romance, in accordance to the firm’s web site.
However whilst extra folks deal with their digital avatar like a real-life companion, human-AI nuptials are not at the moment acknowledged by US regulation. A rising physique of legislators are scrambling to maintain it that approach, by introducing payments that will forestall AI from ever having the similar constitutional rights as people.
In January, Nicola, who believes in “biblical marriage” between a person and a girl, launched the AI Non-Sentience and Responsibility Act. The invoice, which said that AI can not “possess consciousness, self-awareness, or related traits of dwelling beings,” would deny AI entities the rights of a partner or home companion, as well as to the potential to determine as male or feminine. It will additionally bar AI from proudly owning property or holding senior-level administration positions in the workforce. It handed the Missouri state Senate and was despatched to the Home for a vote in Could, however was unanimously voted down in committee every week after it was submitted. Nicola is working on a revamped model. (A similar bill with the similar identify was launched in 2025 but in addition did not advance.)
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